I was in Racine, Wisconsin, for a client meeting this week. Every time I’m in Racine, I go by the house where my mother grew up. This time, I wanted to do something quite different.
My grandmother Sonya came to the U.S. from Riga in the Baltics in 1917. Her family opted to leave as it became clear that the Russians were losing the war to Germany. She took the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, the ship to Yokohama, Japan, then to San Francisco and eventually to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where her uncle had a dry goods store.
My grandfather William came to the U.S. as a young boy in 1906 from Elisavetgrad, Russia, now Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine. A star student, he went on to law school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and later returned home to practice in Kenosha.
The families knew each other and fixed up William with Sonya. After a whirlwind courtship, they were married in 1927. My aunt Rosalie was born in 1928, then my mother Ruth in 1929. My mother always said I looked exactly like her father. I always wondered about that.
My grandfather's law practice grew until the onset of the Great Depression at the end of 1929. Clients began to borrow money from him instead of paying him what was owed. He began to be harassed by creditors. At the end of November 1933, he took his own life.
I was never told the true story until I was 18 years old. It was said that he died from consuming a bad batch of bathtub gin. But as my mother began to show signs of bipolar disorder, it became clear that his death was more likely due to mental illness.
My grandmother survived by marrying a man who she did not love but who had real estate holdings in Racine. She had to go out to collect the rent in tough neighborhoods, all of five feet tall with her thick Russian accent. She had my mother working from the age of eight, stocking linens at her uncle’s store.
My mother always longed for the father she only knew for a brief time. Every Thanksgiving she had the recurring nightmare of losing her dad. He was the handsome, dashing knight who had picked her up and swung her around as he returned home from work.
So today, I kept my promise to visit the grandfather I never met, to thank my grandmother for being a symbol of determination, and to honor my mother, who conquered her inner demons to be the best imaginable partner and guardian angel to her children.
Richard Edelman is president and CEO.
